The “Closing Argument” of UWP 1 ELD

Ziang Zhang ( Jeff)

University of California, Davis

Research Paper Literacy Narrative The Guide of Literacy Narrative

• From my personal experience described in • Started learning and recognizing Chinese characters at a • Generally talk about what is literacy
the literacy narrative, I thought the genres very young age.
narrative.
• Thought to be good at Chinese literature but failed to
Background of texts would influence my reading process. • Discuss how we can present literacy narrative;
Wedge understand the main ideas due to dislike of the texts as
soon as I reached Grade 3. Introduction introduce the idea of multimodality.

• Respondents: 5 international students

• Ask about their genre encounter patterns, genre preferences,
and their differences on feeling toward different genres.
• Data processed in an Excel file.
• Overall results: Students have strong preference on less
Survey
academic and narrative-side genres, while they tend to resist
academic and informative-side genres.
• The result of the survey corresponds to a research conducted by Eng
and Nordin (2017).
• A theory called schema theory, introduced in Eng and Nordin (2017),
might be a key to explain the phenomenon that students’ emotional
differences affect their genre preferences.
• Some researchers (Cervetti et al., 2009) discovered that both narrative
Discussion
featured genres and informative featured genres have no difference on
giving pressure to readers to interpret main ideas.
• Genre differences only affect readers' willingness of reading, while
they have no impact on comprehension.
• Teachers could try to plan their readings in a way that enhance
students’ interests.
Conclusion • Students might consider trying to overcome the antipathy of certain
genres, since they have no impact on further reading process.
• Watched a movie, the Chinese teacher assigned a writing
homework. I misunderstood the “purpose” about this
assignment and decided to write about the movie to get
Progression the thing over with.
• The teacher questioned my effort and told me that she just
wanted us to record the last few pieces of primary school.
• I was inspired by my teacher, so I asked to write a new one
about my reflection of primary school and “fantasy” of middle
Climax school.
• I realized that writing was about expressing true
feelings, instead of following the general "template."
• Connected to Toni Morrison’s Nobel lecture (1993),
Ending “you have truly caught [that bird].”
• Detailed explanations of writing process of the literacy
narrative.
• Introduce two aspects of narrative, “temporality” and
“point of view”, and one feature of narrative, “the
boundary of the self” (Ochs & Capps, 1996)
Step by step • Introduce professional writers’ viewpoints on the first
draft and their revision processes.
• Talk about English variety and translingual
approach. (Important for all writing.)
• Talk about the use of tropes. (Give readers
Special another way to track their changes in
Consideration narrative writing.)

Learning Outcomes

• Due to limited time frame and sample size, only few aspects
were being discussed in this research. • Process (Multi-drafts)
• As Cervetti et al. (2009) claimed, many complex relationships
between genres, contents, and readers’ engagement are still • Knowledge of Conventions (pronoun choices,
Reflection
unclear, suggesting more comprehensive, longer research should tones)
Prediction be conducted.
• Rhetorical Concepts (Narrative as a genre)
• Metacognition (Thinking process)